All go unto one
place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who knoweth the spirit
of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to
the earth? (Eccl 3:20-21)
Then shall the dust
return to earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.
(Eccl 12:7)
While reading a scholarly work on the book
of Ecclesiastes (AKA Qohelet), it struck me that the Latter-day Saint belief in
the spirit world/intermediate state (and it not being “heaven”) helps
harmonise these two biblical texts that the traditional view (the righteous
dead go immediately to heaven) does not:
12:7. The first sentence,
“and the soil returns to the earth as it was before”, applies both to the
earthen vessel, lying broken in the well, and to the human body, lying buried
in the ground, bereft of life-breath.
In 3:20–21, Qohelet said that man has no advantage
over the beast because no one knows whether man’s life-spirit goes upward at
death. In 12:7 he states that man’s life-spirit goes back to God, and this must
be upwards. There is indeed a contradiction here, but it is not between
a belief in an afterlife and a rejection of that belief. The return of the
life-spirit to God simply means death. Neither verse affirms an afterlife.
Schoors (1985b) examined the passages that refer to death and concluded that
Qohelet views death as extinction.
At death, whether of man or beast, the elements of
life—body and breath—separate, and God takes back his gift of life. Ps 104:29,
in describing the death of all creatures, says: “You gather in their
life-spirit and they expire, and they return to their dirt”; see also Job
34:14f. and Sir 40:11 (Hebrew). In the ancient Hebrew anthropology, the person is the body, no less than the animal’s
body is the animal. The life-spirit
or breath (ruaḥ) is an addition that
vivifies the person. This concept is evident in Ezek 37:8–10 and Gen 2:7. The
creature God forms is a man before he
gets the ruaḥ, at which time he
becomes a nepeš ḥayyah, a living
being. (The notion that man is a soul
who has a body is Greek in origin;
the only glimmer of this concept in the HB is in Qoh 3:21.) When the spirit is
removed, the person, and not only the
body, is said to go to the earth, or to Sheol, or to darkness (Ps 104:29; Qoh
6:4; 9:10; and often). Thus 12:7 does not imply continued existence of the sort
that would overcome death and compensate for the miseries of life. The verse
says that at death a person’s body returns to the dirt and his life-spirit is
withdrawn, in other words, he is deprived of breath, without which he is a
helpless, weary semi-being.
The contradiction between 12:7 and 3:21 lies in the
significance they attribute to the spirit’s ascent. In 3:20–21 Qohelet expresses doubt that the
life-spirit rises at death but implicitly grants that this event would
distinguish man’s demise from mere animal death, and moreover that this
ascension would save man from being hebel.
In 12:7, on the other hand, Qohelet assumes that the spirit returns to God but
takes this event to mean death and nothing more, and this assumption does not
prevent a hebel-judgment in the next
verse. If the return of the spirit did mean something more than the
extinguishing of life, some form of salvation for the individual, Qohelet would
be reversing the entire pessimistic, worldly thrust of the book in one sentence
without context or preparation. Moreover, the very next sentence, the
declaration of universal absurdity, would be undermined, for if the essential
part of man, the soul (as ruaḥ would
mean in that case), were to survive with God, man would not be hebel, however that word is defined.
Since 12:7 does not imply afterlife, it is actually more pessimistic than 3:21. In the
earlier verse, Qohelet at least allows that the life-spirit’s ascent to God
would redeem humanity from absurdity, whereas in the later verse he affirms
such an ascent and yet sees no escape from death’s obliterating power or life’s
universal absurdity.
The contradiction in the assumptions behind these
two verses cannot be reconciled logically, but it does not have major implications for
the book’s meaning. In 3:21 Qohelet is countering an idea that was probably
appearing in Jewish thought for the first time: the ascent of the soul to
eternal life. Having discounted that possibility as unknowable and thus
irrelevant, Qohelet leaves it aside. When, at the climax of his grim
description of death in chapter 12, he speaks of the departure of the
life-breath, he perceives it in the ancient way as signifying God’s
repossession of the life force. (Michael V. Fox, Qohelet and His
Contradictions [Decatur, Ga.: The Almond Press, 1989], 308-9)
For a discussion (and refutation) of “soul
sleep,” see:
Response
to Douglas V. Pond on Biblical and LDS Anthropology and Eschatology
